Come Learn with Us

Each semester, the Institute hosts a bi-weekly seminar for university affiliates and community members on a select topic in Hasidic thought. Intended to be accessible regardless of one’s background in Jewish studies, these sessions combine more traditional methods of text-study with a university-style seminar format with the aim of introducing an academic audience to both the form and content of Hasidic learning. Driven by the belief that Hasidic learning has the capacity to nurture an alternative mode of insight that is both intellectually sophisticated and spiritually enriching, these sessions allow for an exciting and timely experiment in how the contemporary academy and more traditional modes of learning might fruitfully interact and learn from one another.

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To this end, we seek to bring together a diverse group of students from various fields of study, each of whom can bring their own lens to bear on the traditional study of a Hasidic text. Rather than simply reduce its content to the more familiar terms of contemporary academic disciplines, however, the point is to give participants the tools to encounter a text on its own terms–yet in a way that also lays bare its potential to speak to a variety of other intellectual worlds. Thus, without shying away from modern tools of critical analysis, these sessions seek to acquaint participants with a more personal and reverential style of learning less commonly found in the modern academy—one that encourages the reader to “hear” what the text has to tell them and to be open to being changed by it.